Bryn Mawr Classical Review
03.03.18

Michael P. Steinberg (ed.), The Presence of the Historian:
Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. History and Theory: Studies
in the Philosophy of History, Beiheft 30. Wesleyan University, 1991. Pp.
64. LC 63-47837.

Reviewed
by William M. Calder III, The University of Illinois at
Urbana/Champaign.

At least 25 years are needed before a scholar can be viewed
historically and his work considered in context. Arnaldo Momigliano died 1
September 1987. Widow, daughter, former students and enemies survive.
People who did not know him are not yet competent to evaluate the
achievement. On the other hand people who write soon after often possess
facts that would be later lost. They may interpret them naively or
tendentiously; but they preserve them and, because they are fundamentally
memoirists, become themselves sources. The introduction and five papers
here amount to five panegyrics. Only one is new and not a panegyric,
Professor Bowersock's. The editor, Michael P. Steinberg, ought to have
revealed the sources of the reprints in a table of contents which the
volume lacks. Nor is there an index. He ought also somewhere to have given
the titles of the contributors. Three however appear first in
English.1 The great casualty is Karl Christ. His
magisterial essay on Momigliano2 is stripped
of most of its annotation,
amputated from 46 to eight pages, incompetently translated3 and even doctored for the American market. At p. 10
the sentence "The problems in the history of German scholarship were
addressed as well, despite the degree of personal suffering that
Momigliano himself had endured at the hands of its perverted descendants"
"expands" Christ's (Profile, 289) "die klassische deutsche
Tradition im
Bereich der Altertumswissenschaften." Nor do I understand how the brutal
Nazi guards who slew Momigliano's parents were "descendants of German
scholarship." Los Angeles policemen who beat blacks have never read
Gildersleeve. Either room should have been found for the whole of
Christ's essay in a faithful version or his shorter one already available
in English4 ought to have been reprinted
without omissions.

Steinberg (p. 1) calls Momigliano "a universal
historian," a title I should reserve for men like Spengler and Toynbee. He
was an ancient historian, interested as well in the history of his
subject. He taught in Italy 1932-38, not 1929-38 (p. 1). It is untrue (p.
1) that he "declined to return to Italy after the war." He
soon returned annually. We are told (p. 3) that Droysen wrote "A History
of Hellenism." Then come the leitmotives that will resound through the
volume. We learn of M.'s love of facts, aversion to theory, analytical
clarity of vision, and depth of personal commitment. We are assured that
he was liberal.

Christ's paper (pp. 5-12) in its abbreviated form
has become too many names without context and ideas stripped of their rich
documentation. It is unfair to judge Christ by it. I shall not. I urge the
intelligent to read the original. It is easily available.

Weinberg's paper (pp. 13-26) seeks in a rather muddled way to evaluate
M.'s contribution to Jewish studies. The article was written some seven
months after his death and is here published for the third time. She
argues from unsatisfactory sources that (p. 14) M. "preserved with
integrity to the end of his life" "a total and
unswerving commitment to Judaism and Jewishness." Then there are summaries
of random articles by M. dealing with Judaism and easily available in the
Contributi. The whole is carelessly written. "Christianity emerged
in the
Hellenistic period" (p. 15). M. wrote "four major works" on Greece, Rome
and Judaea between 1930 and 1934 (p. 15). We are only told one of them.
George Foot Moore, professor of the History of Religions at Harvard is
called a clergyman (p. 17). She calls the Gallic carrum (26) a
"Latin word." Yes, if she calls spaghetti English. Only in the vaguest
terms does
she document M.'s contributions to Jewish studies. What she says amounts
to the fact that specialists, ignorant of the Greek and Roman background
of Hellenistic Judaism, learn from reading M. that Jewish texts were
sometimes colored by their Greco-Roman context. She never cites evidence
proving his mastery of Hebrew. Did he know Aramaic and Syriac as Eduard
Schwartz and Ed. Meyer? It is implied not stated that he never made a
permanent contribution, redating a source or providing an exegesis that
permanently changed subsequent interpretation. There is nothing of the
reaction of senior or contemporary semiticists to his work, whether
reviewers or subsequent informed investigators.

She ignores what
is really important. M.'s concern with Judaism and its greatest heresy
Christianity is further proof of his conviction that the history of
religion exceeds in importance military or political history. What is
Gaugamela to us? The rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (all treated
by Meyer) still can
determine history. This is the tradition of Eduard Meyer and Wilamowitz
but quite different from Th. Mommsen, Rostovtzeff and even Syme. Mommsen
abandoned his country pastor father and Marxism discouraged Rostovtzeff.
Syme only reluctantly admitted that religion was able to influence
reasonable men of power and intelligence.

G.W. Bowersock (pp.
27-36) writes on "Momigliano's Quest for the Person," where "person" means
individual. He stresses Momigliano's interest in biography and
autobiography and ability to show how modern scholars' views of antiquity
are determined by their private lives.5 Droysen's interest in Hellenistic
Judaism derives from the fact that his wife was a Jewess (p. 31). Care is
needed. Bowersock argues that because Momigliano was a Jew he "was able to
provide an exceptionally perceptive treatment of the career of Bernays"
(p. 31). This is misdirected praise. Momigliano
wilfully conceals the most important fact of Bernays' personal life, that
he was a homosexual. He attributes the love affair with Paul Heyse
(Quinto Contributo, 135) to a "common interest in modern
literatures." Freud knew the truth in 1932.6 M. knows Freud's letter but conceals its content
(ibid., p. 153, n.2). Homosexuality was surely an attraction of Scaliger
for Bernays. Not a word on that.

Much to his credit Bowersock
dares to suggest that M. overemphasizes Judaism in matters which he
discusses. M. sees the Sibylline oracles as "essentially a repository of
Jewish revelations." Bowersock remarks (33) "yet we know well (and he knew
too) that apocalyptic literature in the world of the Greeks and the
Romans had a long and well-documented history that was entirely
independent of the Jews." That is, according to Bowersock, M. suppressed
evidence known to him for racist reasons. This became an obsession. M.
alleged that Judaism determined Eduard Fraenkel's
character, a thesis denied by those who knew him.7 He has also argued that Eduard Meyer was "quasi
certamente di distante origine ebraica" (Settimo Contributo, 215).
His only "evidence" is the maiden name of Meyer's mother. But
Dessau unlike Dessauer need not be Jewish. The silence of Meyer on his
Jewish mother is deafening.8 On no adduced
evidence M. alleges that either Ernst Kapp or Kurt von Fritz was Jewish.
9 And he has
denied the self-flagellating antisemitism of Felix Jacoby, although it is
attested by those who knew him.10 One recalls
Beloch. M.'s Jews are proud to be Jews and (Bernays!) they are not
homosexuals, a vice condemned in
Leviticus. He condemns Droysen's son for concealing the Jewish origin of
his mother but Gustav Droysen discusses it at length.11 When Germans call M. a Berufsjude, they
have
grounds. The fact is that anything M. says on this subject must be
controlled for what A.D. Nock called "the coefficient of mendacity."
Bowersock leads the way.

Bowersock, however, accepts at face
value M.'s account of his politics -- "non-Fascist" (p. 35) -- in the
thirties. Much work must be done here. It should start with the
publications later omitted by M. from his bibliography (cf. Jaeger).
Canfora has begun this.12 Precisely what did
he write on Roman Africa in 1934? Reprints of articles from the early
thirties must be carefully compared with the originals to see if changes
or omissions have been introduced. Jaeger altered postwar reprints of
Paideia I. And just who was Prof. Arno Wolf (Contributo,
326)? Correspondence from the period must be examined and survivors
interviewed
and taped. Only this way can we obey M.'s exhortation (p. 2): "We must
face the facts."

Carlo Ginzburg provides an unnecessary chapter
(pp. 37-48) on "Momigliano and de Martino," a book of whose M. briefly
reviewed in 1961 (= Quarto Contributo, 577-580). De Martino was a
person
who said magism instead of magic, wrote sentences like (p. 39) "numinous
energy ... is the pedagogy of the identifying function of the intellect"
and
when he had questions about ancient religion would write not to M.P.
Nilsson but (p. 41) to Karl Kerenyi. Most of Ginzburg's paper is concerned
with some unpublished letters between de Martino and someone called
Pettazoni. M. is rarely mentioned until the last page or two and
classicists will be relieved to learn that any influence of de Martino on
M. remains unproven. Presumably M. never corresponded with him. If he did,
Ginzburg does not know the letters. I have no idea why the article has
the title it does nor why it was published a second time in this volume.

A valuable contribution, because it records facts that would
otherwise be lost, is Oswyn Murray's "Arnaldo Momigliano in England" (pp.
49-64).13 It could have been a good deal
better. Murray, a professional historian, omits crucial information. He
never indicates that M. never became a British subject. This explains why
he was never knighted, while Moses Finley was. He never mentions the name
of M.'s wife (Gemma Segre), the date of their marriage, the occupation of
her father or whether she was Jewish. He never tells why Hugh Last helped
M. "Ultimus," as he was called by those who despised him, did all he could
to thwart the career of the young Syme. He was an unprincipled intrigant
jealous of those better than he. Did he use the young M., who was not a
threat, as a weapon against Syme? Brown reports (p. 435) the excitement
with which M. in old age first discovered that Last was a Jew. Was this a
reason why Last aided a brilliant young victim of antisemitism?

Murray alludes to six women whom M. befriended: Gertrud Bing, Isobel
Henderson, Sally Humphries, Anne Marie Meyer (his literary executrix),
Iris Murdock, and Beryl Smalley. Did M. in fact learn from them? If so
something should be made of the fact. He would be the unique example in
the modern history of classical
scholarship of a great male scholar taught by women. Or did he simply fear
male rivals and sought comfort in a series of adoring women disciples?
Because the English never really had doctoral programs, M. never had in
the German or American sense students. Indeed
we are never told whether he directed dissertations but only that he much
influenced (p. 57) Peter Brown and the Camerons. His influence was general
rather than specific. He expanded the interests of English ancient
historians for subjects like the origin
of Rome, late antiquity and of course what Murray calls historiography,
sc. Wissenschaftsgeschichte. He introduced the seminar to London
where his
influence was comparable to Fraenkel's in Oxford. He emphasized the man
and facts.

M. was a conscientious, witty, productive polymath and
a voracious reader with a fine memory and an eye for accurate detail. I
continue to learn a great deal from his essays on subjects I do not know
about. On subjects I control I find errors in detail and intelligent
hypotheses that do not fit the evidence.14 This is often because, as an ancient historian
accustomed to work from published sources, he never learned that for the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries anything of importance is unpublished.
He preferred facts to theory and held to do otherwise is to trivialize
history. How often did he successfully emend a text, restore an
inscription, or make new facts out of facts? In this respect one can only
contrast Syme's Roman Papers with the Contributi. As an
European who
learned English well enough to create a winning style of his own, he did
only good in spreading among the English the gospel of Croce that
historians not kings and generals make history. To the shame of the
English it took an Italian refugee to show them the abiding importance of
Gibbon and Grote (58-59)! His papers and reviews prove that in classics
where so little evidence survives all history is contemporary history or
better "Alles heißt Rezeption." Much could be said of this complex
influential man. He deserved better
than this volume where only the essays by Bowersock and Murray reward
perusal.

NOTES

[1] Steinberg informs
us (7 n. 9)
that Oswyn Murray's "essay appears in translation on pages 49-64 of this
volume." In fact, as Murray tells us (49 n.1), the revised English
original first appears there. The earlier publication was an Italian
translation. Murray did not write the article in Italian, as Steinberg
believes.

[3] E.g. Christ's (Profile, 269) "[Droysen] ein
für einmal sah, daß der entscheidende Charakter des Hellenismus
die
Konstituierung einer kosmopolitischen Zivilisation ist" becomes in
Steinberg's English "Droysen in fact recognized for once and for all that
the essential characteristic of Hellenism is the constitution of a
cosmopolitan civilization." What Christ means is: "Droysen saw once and
for all that the decisive characteristic of the Hellenistic Age was the
founding of a cosmopolitan civilization." There is a big difference.

[8] There is further error. M. makes
Meyer like himself a guest professor at Chicago (217). He only gave a
lecture there. This is further evidence for Bowersock's thesis that M.
sought himself in the past.

[10] See Settimo Contributo, 518, where he
libels Georg Picht simply because he does not want to believe that Jacoby
compared Augustus with Hitler. A scholar like Joachim Stenzel, who knew
Jacoby since his childhood, tells me that he has no difficulty at all with
this.

[11] See Gustav Droysen, Johann Gustav
Droysen I Bis zum Beginn der Frankfürter Tätigkeit
(Leipzig/Berlin 1910) 111 ff. (discussion of his father's engagement and
his Jewish mother's
family). Because this contradicts his thesis that Germans were ashamed of
being Jews, M. either ignores or denies what G. Droysen says or else he
has never read the book he condemns. See Quinto Contributo 1.124
"Gustav never mentions the circumstance that his mother was Jewish."
Bowersock
(31 n. 24) does not warn the reader of this misrepresentation.

[13] Attention should be drawn to Peter Brown,
"Arnaldo
Dante Momigliano 1908-1987," PBA 74 (1988) 405-442. More than a
necrology,
this is the best biography of M. available and ought to have been included
in this volume in place of Ginzburg or the mutilated remains of Christ. A
number of details
in Murray are shared with Brown. Whether Murray has taken them from Brown,
whom he does not cite, or whether they derive from a common source, I do
not know.

[14] A typical example is M.'s speculation
based on misunderstood published sources as to why Wilamowitz left Bonn:
see RhM 130 (1987) 366-383.